


Inappropriate dance numbers

by Petra



Category: Slings & Arrows, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Musicals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-19
Updated: 2012-06-19
Packaged: 2017-11-08 02:55:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/438359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petra/pseuds/Petra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Avengers go to see a revival of Star-Spangled Man! directed by Darren Nichols.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inappropriate dance numbers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theleaveswant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theleaveswant/gifts).



"You'll love it," Tony told Steve.

"It's not terrible," Pepper said. "I mean, it's not great, but it's not terrible."

"I've never seen it," Natasha said. "But you might want to stay home."

Clint shook his head. "Don't do it. Just don't."

"What's a musical?" Thor asked.

"So, how much Xanax do you have to take before it starts being effective?" Bruce asked, and then Steve found out things about the modern pharmaceutical industry that made his head hurt.

Still, on the opening night of the revival of _Star-Spangled Man!_ on Broadway when it came south from New Burbage, they had front-row seats donated by the director in a fit of press-hungry cynicism--or so the note that came with the tickets said.

Steve could handle the way the lead actor, who didn't look like him but had a good performing smile, slouched around being him-before and then howled through the transformation. He held his head at an angle that felt familiar, sort of. The guy they had playing Bucky looked even less like Bucky than not-Steve looked like Steve, which made it easier to take.

Peggy had a pronounced Canadian accent, and that helped, too. She didn't look anything like Peggy, too thin, too pale, and her hair was all wrong. It was familiar-looking--Steve could tell someone had done research on the Forties--but it wasn't Peggy.

And whoever Madeline was based on--the flirty WREN who'd go all the way with Bucky, as she sang in her broad London accent--Steve figured that was poetic license.

The big show-stopper before intermission had Peggy and Steve broken up, Peggy running off with Howard--except his name was Francis Starr, for some reason, probably because Howard Stark was the kind of guy who didn't want to be portrayed running around with Cap's girl on stage--and Bucky and his girl on the outs because he found out she'd been kissing somebody else.

"What do you think?" Pepper asked Steve. She was right next to him, dressed as incognito as the rest of them, though they weren't exactly a subtle bunch of people. Her concession to trying to hide from the press was that she was wearing flats.

They made her look about as unlike her normal self as the lady playing Peggy was from Peggy.

Steve shrugged. "They sing pretty well, and Madeline sure can tap-dance."

"Yeah, but does it get you right here?" Tony tapped his chest with a faint metallic noise.

"Not really." Steve hunched down in his seat and reread the song list. Peggy's reprise of "I Can't Go On Alone" didn't sound like a good song to end a musical comedy on, but the program notes said it was a comedy and nobody except Bruce seemed to worry about what he'd think of it. "It's not about--" Steve glanced over his shoulder, but the people sitting behind them had run to the bathrooms as soon as the curtain fell. "It's not about me, not really."

"But it is," said somebody else. 

Steve put his sunglasses back on and tried to shrink into his seat. The guy who had come up behind him was wearing a black velvet suit, something Steve had never heard of before and hoped never to see again any time soon, and he had the kind of glasses that made Steve feel like he'd fallen back in time. Hipster glasses, Tony called them. "I don't know what you mean," Steve said.

"Of course you do." The man sighed about as loudly as the Hulk did when a battle ended. "Unless you are a group of extremely well-built people who have somehow crept in on giant superhero feet to the seats I specifically designated for someone else."

Tony turned around in his chair and offered his hand. "Okay, you got us," he said.

The man in the velvet suit shook his hand with a tight, self-satisfied smile. "Thank you so much for coming, Mr. Stark. And if your broad-shouldered friend would care to meet any of the cast afterward, we would be honored to have such a classic example of masculinity as performance gracing our stage door, or the bar where I expect everyone will gather to wipe the red, white, and blue greasepaint from their sweaty brows."

"How does it end?" Steve asked, straightening up and turning around. He wasn't afraid of most anything, even people who used sentences like whatever the heck that was.

"Surely you of all people know the answer to that," said the velvet-wearing guy, who eyed Steve through his thick glasses with the kind of look Madeline-on-stage gave Bucky.

Bruce cleared his throat. "Mr. Nichols, right? Bruce Banner." He offered his hand.

"Oh," said Mr. Nichols, in a swoony voice. "I have some paperwork to show you, Doctor Banner. The small matter of a show based on your life experiences--surely you understand that they're marketable, in the right framework and with the way they represent both modern sensibilities and modern terror of returning to a pre-Enlightenment age and losing all power of reason, little though 'Enlightenment' and 'reason' mean in the theatrical idiom."

"Tell him how it ends," Bruce said, his voice the kind of calm that Steve recognized as overlaying absolutely not calm at all.

"Ahistorically, alas. The marketability of the unvarnished truth was not as high in 1952 when this piece debuted as it is presently, and audiences required a certain amount of hope--though the postulate of survival that is used here is less stretched than, say, the premise of _Brigadoon_ , which requires enough suspension of disbelief to levitate Doctor Banner in one of his more emotional moments."

Steve said, "I've never heard of _Brigadoon_."

"Oh--oh, of course not." Mr. Nichols smiled, no, simpered at him. "Everyone lives happily ever after, darling." He patted Steve's shoulder, which seemed awfully forward for somebody who'd just met him. "A double wedding, once Barnes is recovered in an amazing rescue attempt and the good Captain is saved from his chilly bathtub in a manner not terribly dissimilar to the denouement of _Miss Saigon_ , such as it is, though with somewhat less overwrought orchestration and fewer helicopters. There is tap-dancing, there is a kick-line, white veils, a big pair of kisses--unfortunately not between Barnes and the Captain, you would not believe the letter I got from the Tams-Witmark lawyers when I suggested a small change to the blocking, the blocking, I ask you."

Steve felt something in his heart relax. He hated the idea of having a play that was so far from the truth--less true than the comics had been, even, and that was going some--but he didn't want to sit in a theater and watch everybody he cared about die again. "What about Howard? I mean Francis?"

Mr. Nichols tapped his nose. "We must have a few surprises left for you, but I haven't given your litigious friends any reason to take me to court." 

"That's something," Pepper said.

Natasha sighed and took a sheaf of papers out of her handbag that should by all rights not have been able to fit them. "Do you want to hang onto them, just in case?"

"Sure." Pepper took the papers and put them under her seat.

"You won't need them, I promise, Ms. Potts," said Mr. Nichols. He took a pocket watch out of his suit and glanced at it. "I must be off now and see to my flock of actors--you know how they are on an opening night, more high-strung than Hawkeye here--but thank you for coming and bringing your little paparazzi entourage. We would love to see you after the show. Derrick, especially, keeps saying how much he'd like to meet you." He squeezed Steve's arm, made a small appreciative noise, and was off down the row of seats before Steve could think of what to say.

"Who's Derrick?" Steve asked.

Thor held up the program. "The actor who portrays the Captain," he said, barely managing to keep his voice down to any sort of polite level.

Steve hunkered down in his seat one more time as if that would hide the guy playing him from everybody else's eyes. "I think I'd rather just go home."

"And miss an opening night party? Those things get wild." Tony ruffled his hair affectionately and Steve didn't smack his hand, mostly because there were people coming back into the theater and getting into a scuffle would just draw attention. "Don't you miss your chorus girls, Triple Threat?"

"They could drink you under the table, most of them."

Tony looked deeply offended. "No."

"Then we must go!" Thor declared.

The lights dipped, then came back up. "I'll think about it," Steve promised.

He'd had dreams that went like the ending of the show, all bright and happy and completely implausible. Although his dreams had a lot less six-part harmony. Steve tried not to think about it too hard, especially not in relationship to himself, but it was weird watching some guy in his old uniform getting married to a girl who'd known him for two acts, and even weirder watching Bucky getting hitched to a girl who'd sung a duet with him. Once. And then high-kicked her way into his heart, apparently.

It had nothing to do with him, he knew that, but it was still weird.

"I don't know about the rest of you, but I could use a drink," Tony said when everybody finished clapping--it had been a standing ovation, which Steve thought was pretty good until Pepper told him she'd only been to about three shows that didn't get one, ever.

"Okay, okay," Steve said, and gave in.

They left the party six hours later. Tony was hanging onto Bruce's shoulders and humming the _Star-Spangled Man!_ theme while smudged with at least five different shades of lipstick, some of it Pepper's. Steve had Derrick's promise that none of the phone recordings would get onto the internet or be shared with anybody except people playing the role--or Steve would never have taken his shirt off and done those poses. Thor had stopped Bruce from getting too ticked off at Mr. Nichols about the whole _Incredible Dancing Hulk_ idea by talking to the director about Asgardian theatrical traditions. Natasha and Clint had spent the evening talking with the guys playing Bucky and the Commandos about how to make their choreography look more like real fighting stances.

They all had tickets waiting for them whenever they wanted to come back. Steve didn't know whether he'd bother, but it was good to know that if he got curious about what Derrick did with the poses, he could check it out any time.


End file.
